America As Hostage Is Over 5/1/11

First let me say that the raid on Abbottabad to get Bin Laden is historic and a monument to the skill and courage and dedication of our fighting forces. 5/1/11 is the 6/6/44, D-Day, of our irregular warfare military history. Congratulations and well done Seal Team 6, your place in history is sacrosanct.

Why they had to do it, get Bin Laden, at this time and in this way is a subject for epic reflection. At the apogee of feelings instilled by this must be the sense that we will not be held hostage anymore.

Bin Laden, the man who symbolized the threat of terrorist attack for a decade, is dead. The impact of the threat he was has percolated through every fiber of our society from air travel to political exploitation to wars. We have been hostage to Bin Laden’s threats, and now it’s over, if we let it be over.

Obama used the scalpel of a Navy Seal team that took no casualties to succeed, where Bush used a trillion dollars and 46,000 Americans killed or wounded to fail. Focused summary justice succeeded where unjust war failed apocalyptically. War failed to accomplish anything, at more cost to the least benefit, than it ever has before. Here endth the lesson, if we are ready to end it.

America has been held hostage for these last ten years. It was instigated by Bin Laden. It was his goal. But he achieved his goal to a greater degree than he could even have dreamed and did so with the enthusiastic help of George W. Bush.

The public, justly enraged by 9/11, showed varying degrees of approval for George Bush’s initial reaction to 9/11. We just never suspected to where that approval would lead.

The world was behind Bush in 2001-2, as he demanded of the Taliban in Afghanistan that they turn over Bin Laden. Bush then had international support for invading Afghanistan to kill/capture Bin Laden. Then, as clandestine sources revealed in the famous 60 Minutesreport, with Bin Laden within sniper range, the Special Forces group that had tracked him down in Afghanistan was ordered to stand down.

Since it came to light in 2008, the impact of that decision has been watered down and recast as a chain of command issue, that local authority was lacking to authorize the killing or capturing of the Bin Laden, the object of the entire mission. It is, however, hard to believe in incompetence so gross that there was a chain of command breakdown in the most critical mission of the war, the apprehension of the man we invaded Afghanistan to apprehend. So let it not be forgotten that somewhere in the chain of command, someone under Bush’s command, let Bin Laden go, something that defies logic unless you consider the political benefits of doing so.

Why Bin Laden was let go is open to speculation. A political motive for doing so is consistent with the Republican reliance on an external threat to burnish their hawkish image. They used the threat of authoritarian communism to shroud themselves in a cloak of toughness for 40 years. They succeeded in convincing the electorate that they were tough on defense when all they were really tough on was defending DOD spending.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Cold War over and the Peace Dividend beginning to play out under Clinton, the opportunity to exploit a new external threat in terrorism might have been too hard to pass up. What we got from Bush was a staggeringly wasteful Global War on Terrorism rather than Bin Laden brought to justice.

Terrorism is what was used to justify the war on Iraq, directly in the assertion that Iraq funded terrorism and that it was developing WMD to be used to terrorize. When facts failed to support those assertions, it gravely offended the American public and turned the world against us. But still, the GOP managed to employ the threat of terrorism to get Bush re-elected. Kerry, they said, was weak on defense. Terrorism was used to justify hundreds of billions in occupying Iraq and Afghanistan. Terrorism was used to drown the Pentagon in funding for development of anti- terrorism measures. Terrorism was used to justify torture, suspension of habeas corpus and puncture the civilizing shield of our valued personal privacy, even the privacy of your privates in airports.

The appropriate response to Bin Laden would have been for Bush to do in 2002 what Obama has just done in 2011. Instead, Bush played right into Bin Laden’s plan to make America go broke fighting the phantom of terrorism with our enormous, bloated, military apparatus instead of traditional clandestine anti-terror methods.

America went broke, while for the military industrial complex it was back to the good old days like the Red Scare defense spending cornucopia. Literally, you could not have made poorer choices in regard to Bin Laden and Al Queda than the Bush administration and congress made. True, the press and a good number of Democrats went along with it, the news and politics business being driven by the same cash flows as defense business interests. The fact remains though, that the GOP, not Bin Laden, held us hostage of a terror threat to fund defense spending and to reinforce defense bonafides of their candidates.

Republicans so overworked the terrorism threat that it lost all purchase on the mind of the public. They were swept out of office in 2006-08. With the near total collapse of the economy in 2008 due to conservative deregulation of banking and a doubling of the national debt due to wars, the Bush tax cuts, the GOP sponsored but unfunded Medicare drug program and the bailouts, the GOP has now settled on a new threat with which to frighten soccer moms. That threat is the debt that they themselves had created.

In the name of this dire new threat that no one saw coming except every un-bribed economist in the world, the Republicans now hold Americans hostage again. The unemployed have been held hostage for jobs and stimulus spending. The poor and middle class have been held hostage for tax cuts for the rich. Unions are held hostage to States drowning in red ink and all the social safety net spending crafted in the last 80 years is now hostage to the national debt. Government itself is hostage to the threat created by the GOP out of their own doings. The only thing Republicans have screwed up worse than the handling of terrorism is their own handling of the deficit/debt, and they expect the public not to notice either of these colossal failures because they themselves have made terrorists and the debt so scary.

The thing to remember in these days coming after the bursting of the Bin Laden myth is that Republicans just make things up to scare you with. They made up the Global War on Terror and they created the debt with which they now scare you into letting them make worse through economically unsound austerity measures. Considering their record of gross ineffectiveness at fighting terror, basically keeping the threat going as long as it served them, it might behoove you to consider that they will be no more effective at disposing of the debt problem. The debt serves their political aim and so, like terrorism, they will keep it a threat as long as they can.

It’s time for Americans to realize just who it is that has held them hostage. It was not Bin Laden and now might be a good time to let go of our hostage mentality so carefully inculcated in us by the GOP.